I have recently got my first Blackberry and I'm finding it surprisingly unintuitive. I'm still trying to get it to work as a phone properly! It is an 8100 Pearl.

At the moment it is only any use for incoming calls, redialling recent calls or initiating brand new numbers. Trying to find existing numbers in memory otherwise is mostly a non starter, yet ordinary cheap mobile phones do it easily.

The numbers are all in there, because the majority of incoming calls identify with the caller's name correctly. They were all entered in when I first got it and synchronised things.
However, If I want to phone someone and go into addresses, the lists of people there are missing dozens of names and I cannot work out where Blackberry hides the other ones. There is clearly more than one address book in there and the missing one is far bigger than the visible one and contains much more important numbers. Other Blackberry users that I have asked for help have been mystified too.

Something else I remembered. If I use the search facility to try to search for a name it denies the existance of names I know are in there and only appears to search in the shorter and only apparent address book.
Conversely, if I manually enter in a familiar phone number, when I start to dial it will affirm the name even though the search denied they were known. Incoming calls from the same people show their names even though the visible address book does not list them, nor a search admit their existance.

Until I can get it at least to function properly as a phone I haven't dared to graduate to setting up for emails!

Are there enough clues there for some kind reader to point me in the right direction?